General practice in England is facing numerous pressures and challenges, but also opportunities. NHS England’s Five Year Forward View envisages general practice as the bed-rock of integrated health systems.
Against this backdrop, the landscape of English general practice is changing, with a number of trends emerging, and many practices merging into so-called ‘super-partnerships’ or collaborating through network agreements to deliver selected services to their combined registered patient lists.
This paper explores two primary care organisations at the forefront of these changes, summarising the history and evolution of their aims and services; exploring their characteristics and their impact on their sustainability and success. For GP-led organisations and new models of care vanguard sites to develop services of the scale and pace envisaged in the Five Year Forward View, they will need light touch governance and implementation process, grounded in high quality data on outcomes, as well receptive context for change.
This discussion paper was originally prepared as a working paper for the Nuffield Trust and the Commonwealth Fund’s 15th international meeting on improving the quality and efficiency of health care, designed to provoke and inform debate. This paper is one of three UK papers commissioned for the meeting and subsequently prepared for publication by the Nuffield Trust.